Ichetucknee River Riding

Florida is famous for many things, including being the home of NASA, Disney World, the Florida Keys and more but there is one thing that often gets forgotten, the beautiful natural spring fed rivers. On Friday, Jenee and I joined many of the staff from work at the Ichetucknee River for a 2 hour tubing float down wonderful 22oC water.


The deal is that for $10 a piece you get your own tube and access to the park. All you have to do is get on the tram that takes you to one end of the park, get in your tube and float downstream at about 1 mph/ 1.62 kph. We had a great time.

That is until the halfway point when Greg informed us that he had lost his camera, a digital point and shoot in a underwater case, about 150 meters upstream. Of course I offered to go back with him to look for it. That doesn't seem to bad, but you'd be wrong. Swimming upstream against the flow of the river was no easy task! AND I had my scuba fins to help. In fact, the only way I could make any progress against the drag of the river was to swim freestyle as fast as I could. It took us nearly 15 minutes to travel the stones throw up the river (Does this sound like a not-so-well-thought-through Chris and Nate kinda thing to do to you?).

Sadly after about 15 minutes we couldn't locate the camera, along with the fact that we were both physically spent fighting the current. What follows next illustrates how little we thought this through, being that now we had to swim back downstream to catch the others... who were now more than 30 minutes downstream!

Now, when you have large scuba fins you can really move fast and thats exactly what we did. So fast that we were diving about a meter down and swimming under huge rafts of a dozen people or so, probably traveling up to 35-40 meters underwater. It still took about 20 minutes to catch the others... Still, it was a great adventure and we got to see lots of fish of all sizes, turtles, birds and apparently there are even otters, but we didn't see any... maybe next time.